victims, perhaps. It only crawled a
little nearer, still growling.

For a while they lay thus, man and beast, mutually eyeing each other.
The eyes of the former were becoming glazed with the agony of utter
weakness but active apprehension. Those of the latter glared yellow and
baleful in the semi-gloom of the hut. It was a horrid sight.

"Hamba, Lupiswana!" repeated the sorcerer, instinctively groping for a
weapon. But with a shrill snarl the brute was at his throat, tearing
and worrying, and, although a small animal, so furious was its frenzy
over this new and copious feast of blood, that it shook the light form
of the wizard, almost as it would have done that of a newly dropped
fawn. And then in the semi-gloom was the horrible spectacle of a man
with his throat half torn out, feebly battling with the enraged furious
beast covered with blood and uttering its guttural snarls, as it tore
and clawed at his already lacerated vitals. But the struggle did not
last. The grim "familiar spirit" had triumphed over its evil master.
Shiminya the sorcerer lay dead in his _muti_ kraal, and the horrible
brute lay growling and snarling as it gorged itself to repletion upon
his mangled body.

And Nanzicele? Exultant, yet somewhat fearing, he decamped with his
booty; but he did not get far. A dizziness and griping pain was upon
him, and he sank down in the river-bed, by a water-hole. What was it?
His wound was slight. Ha! The knife! Yes. A greenish froth was on
the surface of his wound. The knife was poisoned.

His agonies now were hardly less than those of his slayer, and his
thirst became intense. Crawling to a water-hole, he staggered over it
to drink, then drew back appalled. He could not drink there, at any
rate. It was the very hole into which he had helped throw the
unfortunate girl Nompiza. Her decomposing lineaments seemed to glower
at him from the surface of the water as he bent over to drink. With a
raucous yell he flung himself back, and then, in a paroxysm of agonised
convulsions, the rebel and treacherous murderer yielded up the ghost.

He too, you see, had thought to hold the trump card over his
confederate, but it was the latter who held the odd trick. Yet better
for both, swifter and more merciful, would have been the noosed rope of
the white man's justice than the end which had overtaken them.

CHAPTER THIRTY.

CONCLUSION.

Golden August--a sky of cloudless blue softening into the autu